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Concept
Protein family
Summary
A protein family is a group of evolutionarily related proteins. In many cases, a protein family has a corresponding gene family, in which each gene encodes a corresponding protein with a 1:1 relationship. The term "protein family" should not be confused with family as it is used in taxonomy.
Proteins in a family descend from a common ancestor and typically have similar three-dimensional structures, functions, and significant sequence similarity. The most important of these is sequence similarity (usually amino-acid sequence), since it is the strictest indicator of homology and therefore the clearest indicator of common ancestry. A fairly well developed framework exists for evaluating the significance of similarity between a group of sequences using sequence alignment methods. Proteins that do not share a common ancestor are very unlikely to show statistically significant sequence similarity, making sequence alignment a powerful tool for identifying the members of protein families. Families are sometimes grouped together into larger clades called superfamilies based on structural and mechanistic similarity, even if no identifiable sequence homology is seen.
Currently, over 60,000 protein families have been defined, although ambiguity in the definition of "protein family" leads different researchers to highly varying numbers.
As with many biological terms, the use of protein family is somewhat context dependent; it may indicate large groups of proteins with the lowest possible level of detectable sequence similarity, or very narrow groups of proteins with almost identical sequence, function, and three-dimensional structure, or any kind of group in between. To distinguish between these situations, the term protein superfamily is often used for distantly related proteins whose relatedness is not detectable by sequence similarity, but only from shared structural features. Other terms, such as protein class, group, clan, and subfamily, have been coined over the years, but all suffer similar ambiguities of usage.
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